Several Turkish municipalities decided Friday to drop the use of fireworks after two explosions in the northern province of Sakarya killed 10 people.
Mayor of northwestern Edirne province, Recep Gürkan, announced the municipality’s decision on Twitter Thursday, calling on other mayors to implement the same practice.
"We have been always respectful of the environment. After this day, we will not use fireworks in any of our activities. I am calling on all municipalities to not use fireworks," Gürkan said.
Mayor of İzmir Metropolitan Municipality Tunç Soyer was the first to respond to Gürkan’s request, saying: "We won’t allow the killing of creatures for the pleasure of a five-minute spectacle."
After Soyer, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, as well as the mayors of the district municipalities of Adalar, Ataşehir, Beşiktaş, Beylikdüzü, Esenyurt, Küçükçekmece, Kartal and Maltepe announced that they will end the use of fireworks.
Some went even further, such as Istanbul’s Kadıköy Municipality, as Mayor Şerdil Dara Odabaşı said they are considering a complete ban on fireworks usage within the district. "We will bring it to our agenda in the first municipal meeting in September," he said.
The northern Sakarya province was hit by two explosions in a week, in which seven people were killed and many others wounded.
Seven people were killed and 127 others were injured on July 3 when an explosion struck a fireworks factory, the biggest of its kind in Turkey, in the Hendek district of Sakarya.
The explosion in the 15-acre factory was so powerful that it shattered windows of nearby buildings and was heard from as far as 50 kilometers (31 miles) away.
Six days after the explosion, three soldiers were killed and six others were injured in another blast in a truck in Taşkısığı, a rural region home to quarries, a military base and a construction site for a section of a new highway.
The explosion took place when soldiers were carrying unexploded fireworks from last week's factory blast for demolition in a quarry.
